Political life in America has been so intensely polarized for so long that we now accept the condition as permanent, even as the costs steadily mount. A generation ago, it would have been unthinkable for one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation in modern history, the Affordable Care Act, to be voted into law without a single Republican “aye” in either the House or the Senate; or for a Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, to say that he no longer reads either The New York Times or TheWashington Post, because both are incurably biased; or for the presidential nominee of one of the two major parties to get zero percent of the vote in some 150 precincts in New York and Philadelphia, as Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Our country, it seems, is fast becoming two separate nations. Each has its own political party, its own cable-news sermonizers; its own digital oracles, scandal-mongers, and data miners; its own billionaire donors and advocacy groups; its own economists and corps of scientific experts. Stranger still, this is happening at a time of unparalleled social and cultural heterogeneity. The long-deferred dream of the melting pot now seems within reach, and yet our politics feels savorless and unseasoned. The debates grow noisier but also blander, devoid of spontaneity and surprise, in part because once-thriving political subspecies—populist southern Democrats, liberal northeastern Republicans, prairie and plains Socialists, and mavericks in both parties—verge on extinction. We are left instead with ritualized conflict staged and restaged.

How to explain this paradox—this sameness-in-variety? How even to describe it? For more than a decade, Rick Perlstein, a historian born in 1969, has pursued the subject of polarization in a sequence of very long books. The latest, The Invisible Bridge, is the third in a project now exceeding 2,300 pages, covering a mere dozen years, 1964 to 1976. The trilogy centers on two defeated insurgent presidential campaigns (Barry Goldwater’s and Ronald Reagan’s), with an insurgent disgraced presidency, Richard Nixon’s, in between.

Along the way, something has happened. A mission that began with every promise of reconstructing the origins of conservative “movement” politics has degenerated into a manic chronicle of what Philip Roth, in a different context, once called “Pure American Dada,” and what Perlstein himself has labeled the “wingnuttism” of the “whackadoodle far-right.” Perlstein’s gift for energetic caricature and his taste for bizarre incidents have overpowered his impulse to sift through the ideas and beliefs that animate his subjects, and to grapple seriously with a politics rooted in authentic if not always coherent dissent.

The mid-1970s were “death-haunted times” when the “survival of the republic” seemed uncertain.

A self-described “sixties obsessive since childhood,” Perlstein buoyantly drew on the decade’s submerged history in the first and so far the best of the series, Before the Storm (2001), a thoroughly researched and exuberantly written account of the quixotic 1964 presidential campaign. The book’s subtitle, Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, is sardonic. Perlstein persuasively argues that even at its apogee in the prosperous 1950s, the “cult of ‘American consensus,’ ” as he would later call it, seethed with dark rebellions, some of them insurrectionist in spirit as well as in tactics: Joseph McCarthy’s Red-hunting investigations and the organized “massive resistance” of segregationist Dixiecrats, along with assorted anti-tax and states’-rights crusades. Radicals inspired, and in some instances orchestrated, Goldwater’s campaign—the literary ideologues at National Review, the grass-roots operatives in the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom, the wealthy businessmen Frank Cullen Brophy and H. L. Hunt, who prefigured the Koch brothers of our own moment.

Goldwater, reluctantly “drafted” to lead the campaign, knew he would lose, and this lent his quest a piquancy and charm that Perlstein doesn’t find in later conservative tribunes. In his second book, Nixonland, Perlstein’s loathing of his subject erupts from the outset and spills over into absurdity. Stacking the deck early on, Perlstein ridicules a letter the 11-year-old Nixon, a poor boy from the Orange County provinces, sent to the Los Angeles Times asking for a job. “I am willing to come to your office at any time and I will accept any pay offered,” Nixon wrote. To Perlstein, this innocent plea is dark evidence of a “foreshadowing trait: groveling to elevate his station in life.” And he doesn’t let up. Not content to note Congressman Nixon’s dismay when McCarthy pilfered from the speech he gave in the House after helping to ensnare the Soviet agent Alger Hiss, Perlstein jazzes it up in the style, or anti-style, of Mickey Spillane. “The pitch Nixon had spent years setting up, McCarthy hit out of the park. The bastard.”

An insistent vulgarity has overtaken Perlstein’s prose, and it implies contempt not just for Nixon but for the public that eventually elected him president twice, the second time in one of the biggest landslides in history. For Perlstein, the mere fact of a President Nixon is explicable only as pathology. This is the same argument Barack Obama’s unhinged detractors make about him. And just as those detractors depict the pragmatist Obama as the agent of anti-Americanism, so Perlstein describes the centrist Nixon as the sole author of “the fracturing of America,” who feasted on middle-American fears of black militants and campus radicals—even as he turned the federal government into a private militia. After the Kent State protest, in which National Guardsmen killed four demonstrators, vapors of hatred enveloped the victims and, Perlstein writes, “a rumor spread” that one of the four, “whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell.”

Perlstein, who calls himself a “social historian,” now finds rumor more illuminating than fact. His first book drew on more than a dozen archival collections. He has since adopted the methodology of the Web aggregator: his preferred sources are digitally accessed news clippings and TV shows. Some might find this intellectually lazy, but Perlstein proudly Googles in the name of grass-roots activism. “My effort here is about intellectual democracy, in the spirit of the open source software movement,” he explains in the online notes for The Invisible Bridge, adding, “I welcome messages about errors, omissions, broken links and any questions.” He means it, too: he has included a Gmail address.

This crowd-sourced scholarship of the people’s historian is in keeping with the Greek-chorus theme of his new book, with its lurid picture of the mid-1970s as “death-haunted times” when the “survival of the republic” seemed uncertain and apocalypse awaited just offstage. “What madness couldn’t be visited on America next?,” Perlstein asks as he inches the story forward from the Watergate investigation to the 1976 election, lavishing attention on political and cultural events—the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the box-office triumph of The Exorcist, the “est” fad, the goofy skits on Saturday Night Live—and mixing them in with “a sort of biography of Ronald Reagan.”

“Sort of” because the story ends with Reagan’s one major electoral setback, his long-shot campaign to unseat the unelected incumbent Gerald Ford. The parallels with Goldwater’s insurgency a dozen years earlier are clear, and so are the differences. This time the defeat is really a victory, which will be realized one election cycle later and lead, in our own time, to Reagan’s enshrinement as the most beloved of modern Republican presidents, whose current acolytes—some of them in their teens when he was in office—still huddle in the penumbra of his remembered glow.

The Invisible Bridge follows Nixonland in its hyper-reductive psychobiographizing. Perlstein rehashes the familiar story of Reagan’s boyhood and youth, plus his years in Hollywood and as a General Electric pitchman, when he perfected a line of extremist patter at once alarmist and soothing. “At turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-heartedness and certainty, Ronald Reagan’s power was simply awesome,” Perlstein writes. “As an athlete of the imagination, he was a Babe Ruth, a Jack Dempsey, a Red Grange.” The cartoon prose obscures rather than explains. Garry Wills has as little use for Reagan as Perlstein does, but his book Reagan’s America, published in 1987, makes the more nuanced case that this most elusive of American political heroes was “just as simple, and just as mysterious, as our collective dreams and memories.” Thus he seemed the right man “at a time when the nation needed some reassuring.”

Perlstein does much better on different terrain. He reminds us that the other dark horse in 1976, Jimmy Carter, was a canny political strategist who read Watergate disillusionment more accurately than any other Democrat and shrewdly juggled personas, presenting himself both as a humble evangelical Christian and as an outsider technocrat-businessman. Perlstein also captures the beginnings of the culture wars in all their rawness. His retelling of a textbook controversy in West Virginia offers much useful new detail, and he deftly links it with anti-busing protests in Boston. Both reflected the “politics of rage” that continue to shape so much of conservative politics, including the Tea Party revolt.

But Perlstein seems unwilling, or unable, to acknowledge that the genie of the New Right might have been loosed by anything other than anger, almost all of it channeled through the Republican Party. “There were two tribes of Americans now,” he writes. The virtuous liberal tribe, appalled by Watergate and other Nixon-era revelations, embraced “a new vision of patriotism produced in the 1960s—a perfect passion for the rule of law, of the fairest possible proceduralism, a longing for political innocence that pundits referred to as the ‘New Politics.’ ” The other tribe, gathering behind Reagan, comprised “the people who had elected Richard Nixon in 1968, in a tangle of rage and piety,” and, like Nixon, believed “our neighbors might be our enemies, and our enemies might destroy us.” In truth, neither side had a monopoly on rage and piety. “The liberals failed,” Norman Mailer wrote after the Watergate hearings:

If Richard Nixon had been standing alone on the street and a thousand nonviolent liberals had been standing around him with flails, they would have beaten each other to death in their rush to get at him. They would have drowned in each other’s slobber in the fury to beat him to a pulp.

In this volume’s 800 pages, Perlstein might have shown how genuinely conservative ideas entered the upper as well as lower reaches of 1970s culture. But you will find only fleeting mention here of the challenge to Keynesian economics made by Milton Friedman and others, or of the reassessments of “the welfare state” in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest, and not a word on the presentiment, in the influential writings of Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Lionel Trilling, that the left, too, would play a part in enfeebling America’s liberal traditions.

The trouble, perhaps, is that Perlstein’s single-minded fixation on one period in American political life has immured him from the history that helped shape those decades. If Perlstein looked further, he would find outbreaks of American Dada in the first days of the republic, and the beginnings of polarization in that most gruesomely “death-haunted” tribal conflict of all, the Civil War.

And imagine the wealth of madness some future Perlstein will uncover by Googling through the first months of 2014: Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling, the Santa Barbara murders, a nation transfixed by the vanished Malaysian airplane, the earnestly legalistic “case” for Obama’s impeachment published in book form by a former federal prosecutor. But how much of our national story is actually contained in those episodes?

In such a climate, it is always tempting to believe that things were once better. No wonder an ideal past has such a tenacious hold on us—the South that is ever rising, the New Deal coalition ever ready to re-form, the saner place America used to be before it became “Nixonland” and built a sinister “invisible bridge” to the toxic enmities of our current moment. “Nostalgia was becoming a national cult,” Perlstein writes of the year 1973. True enough. It remains a cult today, and Perlstein is in danger of becoming its captive. It is a luxury he, and the rest of us, can afford—until the day when the apocalypse is truly upon us.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.